lenses

There are many Russian LTM lenses. Some have an almost cult like following such as the jupiter 3, the more affordable jupiter 8, and the sharp, often rumoured radioactive, industar 61LD. I can vouch for the latter two as being decent for any zorki, fed, voigtlander and even leica rangefinder. The Industar 69 does not come close to any of these lenses.

The lens is actually for a Russian half frame camera, which has enough coverage for my fuji mirrorless, and is a weird zorki m39 mount, similar to the l39 mount used on leica screw cameras but with no rangefinder coupling and a different flange distance. Since it is slightly different from a typical screw lens, the lens requires modification for focusing to infinite when paring with a l39 lens adaptor, this can be done in minutes. There are other, more time consuming ways to achieve this, such as filing down adaptors, but this seems a little overkill for a cheap lens.

The pancake form factor and the 28mm, which results in a wide normal lens around 43-44mm on a aps sensor, makes for a convenient little lens. At the widest aperture nothing is sharp, though it favours the centre with dramatic falloff and blurred edges. It can be sharp around f5.6 but better at f11.

Yes, the lens is awful, but at the same time its becoming my favourite lens on my xpro1. For me, digital photography is too perfect at times. In the film realm I have my leica for straight photography and then I have my holga for pictorial-artistic sort of images, polar opposites. This lens, which didn’t cost much from Bulgaria, creates interesting artistic images with distortions that are not present in the perfect native fuji glass. It fulfils a role away from straight photography.